


Iterative Design

by Echolight



Series: CS Terms One-Shots [2]
Category: Billions (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Episode Tag, Episode: s03e03 A Generation Too Late, Episode: s03e09 Icebreaker, Gen, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Metaphor, One Shot, Present Tense, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-06 08:56:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21223949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Echolight/pseuds/Echolight
Summary: Iterative design is a design methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a product based on the results of testing the most recent iteration to eliminate flaws.The intervening months, between the interview and the call, where Winston focuses on the only thing he’s still sure of.





	Iterative Design

**Author's Note:**

> *insert butterfly meme* is this studying for my HCI class?
> 
> Not quite a CS term but close enough. Done in 2 hrs and 20 minutes.
> 
> PS: this also could have been called "SCRUM" and that haunts me.

The person he is when he walks into the interview is a prototype. He’s a bare bones concept, a theory that he’s worked tirelessly on but not tested, though he isn’t yet aware of it.

Less than an hour later when he walks out, the person he had presented to them has been deemed unsatisfactory.

He's been torn apart by callous, unforgiving evaluators and given new requirements, though he isn’t quite ready to accept that he has to implement them. A lifetime of work and careful design to lead up to this point. No, the flaw isn’t in his meticulous design, it is that others do not understand its inspiration, he thinks defensively.

The person he is several weeks later is deeply dissatisfied, both with himself and his situation. He's taken what they had told him to heart and started considering an entire overhaul of his fundamental design. He’s called back to all his other offers, declining, telling them that he’s taken a position somewhere else. In a way, he has.

He works in a frenzy, gutting, reshaping, and changing fundamental structures until one day he realizes he is nigh unrecognizable to who he used to be, and he doesn’t like it. He’s lost sight of his original goals. He’s not changing to better himself, he’s just recklessly and indiscriminately destroying all of the old with no consideration for its value. And although the goalposts can shift, he’s lost track of everything about himself that he once held dear.

He shouldn’t change who he is to make himself more tolerable to others if this new him isn’t someone he can also be satisfied with. It takes a while longer, but he finds a middle ground.

The person he is several months down the line is, well, he’s still working on it. Painstakingly, he’s rewiring his heart and soldering new circuitry to match his reworked blueprints. But still, sometimes he mourns the loss of a brilliant idea that didn’t fit in with the overarching goal.

The person he is when he stands in the empty room, waiting, isn’t the final product, though he’s made peace with that. He's never going to be the final product, but he thinks that this new version is fundamentally different and improved enough to be evaluated again, that he's changed for the better in enough ways that he's comfortable with presenting this new him to the world.

He thinks this is different from last time. Before, he was made of wire and declaration, a promise of what was to come. Now, he's implemented a new but similar blueprint. He rehearses his speech that he’s prepared one last time in his mind, but when he’s finally saying the words that have been bouncing around his skull for these last few months, he’s barely started before Taylor is cutting him off.

If he promises not to backslide, he thinks. He’s certainly not expecting to do so, as his entire process has been the reconstruction of himself, but it’s tempting, the devil he knows. He can’t guarantee it, but he’ll try his best.

He thinks to the future and who he’ll be one day. It’ll be someone different, but also deeply rooted in what came before. He’ll work toward finding a version of himself that both he and others approve of and refine pieces as best as he can. And the process is never over. The end of every cycle will lead into the next one. The person he’s going to be in the future will have been created from the many ambitious prototypes, exhaustive tests, precise analytics, and careful refinements he’s put into the design that is himself.

**Author's Note:**

> There's like 3 whole lines in this I really love and I want those to be seen. The rest is just an unfortunate byproduct.


End file.
